BOOKS: Merck Veterinary Manual

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2005:

Merck Veterinary Manual
50th Aniversary Edition (9th Edition)
Merial (3239 Satellite Blvd., Duluth, GA 30096), 2005. 2712
pages, hardcover. $45.00.

The 50th Anniversary Edition of the Merck Veterinary Manual
looks strikingly like a Bible. It incorporates the work of more than
350 contributing authors.
“Last updated in 1998,” explains the promotional material,
“the Merck Veterinary Manual is the oldest and most widely consulted
reference of its kind. The Eighth Edition sold more than 100,000
copies worldwide, and was translated into six languages.”
These days as many users, maybe more, simply go to the web
site
<us.merial.com/veterinary_professionals/veterinarians/vet_manual.asp>,
enter a search term, and quickly retrieve the precise information
that seems to suit their needs.

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Post-tsunami anti-rabies drive shifts gears to sterilization

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2005:

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka–Fear that a rabies panic might fuel a
dog massacre subsided in coastal Sri Lanka as January 2005 rolled
into February, allowing the emergency vaccination drive initiated on
December 31, 2004 by volunteer disaster relief coordinator Robert
Blumberg to roll over into a mobile sterilization campaign.
“Sterilization is becoming a crucial issue, with many
animals coming into heat soon and, especially on the east coast,
crowded into refugee camps,” Blumberg said.
“The vaccination campaign put 12,000 red ‘I’ve been
vaccinated’ collars out into the field to calm any hysteria over
rabies that could have led to mass killings, and allowed us to
observe first-hand the conditions for the animals after the December
26 tsunami,” Blumberg explained. “We are now going back to a number
of those initial areas and doing the saturation vaccinating necessary
to ensure having done the 70-75% required for effective rabies
prevention.
“Animal People was our first sponsor, only days after the
waves struck, making it possible to quickly field initial assessment,
vaccination, and treatment teams,” Blumberg acknowledged. Blumberg
also thanked the Best Friends Animal Society, Noah’s Wish, Marchig
Animal Welfare Trust, and the Association of Veterinarians for
Animal Rights for substantial contributions.

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BOOKS: Humane Horse Care For Equine Wellness

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2005:

Humane Horse Care For Equine Wellness
by Andrew F. Fraser

280 pages, paperback. $25.00.

A Guide To Carriage Horse Care & Welfare by the Canadian Farm Animal Care Trust
46 pages, paperback, $10.00.

Both from: Canadian Farm Animal Trust
(22 Commerce Park Drive, Unit C, Suite 306, Barrie, Ontario L4N
8W8), 2003.

CANFACT founder Tom Hughes sent these two very useful manuals
exactly one year ago. I looked them over as thoroughly as I could,
then tried to find a reviewer with appropriate experience in
evaluating horses in normal working and riding condition.
Horse rescuers tend to see the worst of the worst–but the
purpose of these manuals appears to be to enable a humane inspector
to recognize potential problems long before they develop, so as to
put in a few words of preventive advice.

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Hunting, brucellosis, and the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction 10 years after

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2005:

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK–Ten years after the January 1995
reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park, elk near
Gardiner, Montana, are getting a reprieve from seasonal human
hunting pressure. A planned resumption of bison hunting along the
northern park boundary has been postponed–not directly because of
wolves, but because of increased local sensitivity toward the views
of non-hunters.
Growing numbers of wolves are killed attacking livestock,
however, and wildlife managers in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming are
already anticipating the opportunity to sell wolf hunting permits
when wolves come off the federal Endangered Species List.
The role of wolves in regulating Yellowstone elk and bison
numbers is still disputed, but biologists increasingly credit the
return of wolves with increasing the health of the herds by devouring
sick animals, including those who carry brucellosis and chronic
wasting disease.

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New treatment saves rabies victim

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2004:

MILWAUKEE–Jeanna Giese, 15, of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin,
is the sixth person on medical record to survive rabies. After
extensive rehabilitative therapy she may become the first to resume a
normal life.
Bitten by a bat she was trying to take outside on September
12, 2004, Giese did not seek medical care. She began exhibiting
rabies symptoms on October 13, and was admitted to the Children’s
Hospital of Wisconsin in Wauwatosa on October 18.
Pediatric infectious disease specialist Rodney Willoughby,
M.D., on October 19 asked her parents, John and Ann Giese, for
permission to put her into an induced coma, which might protect her
against brain damage while he attempted treatment with an
experimental four-drug combination.
“No one had really done this before, even in animals,”
Willoughby told Juliet Williams of Associated Press. “None of the
drugs are fancy. If this works, it can be done in a lot of
countries.” Willoughby did not disclose the names of the drugs,
pending publication of the data in a peer-reviewed journal.
Kept comatose for a week, Giese became the first rabies
patient ever to survive despite having never been vaccinated, either
before or after she was bitten by a rabid animal, Centers for
Disease Control & Prevent-ion rabies expert Dr. Charles Rupprecht
told Elisabeth Rosenthal of The New York Times. Her exposure was
detected much too late for the five-dose, month-long post-exposure
vaccination sequence to have been effective.

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China bans eating civets

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2004:

BEIJING–The Chinese federal health ministry on November 2
banned the slaughter and cooking of civets for human consumption, to
promote “civilized eating habits,” the state-run Beijing Daily
reported.
“The announcement came a week after the government said 70%
of civets tested in the southern province of Guangdong were carrying
the Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus,” observed Associated
Press.
The October 23 disclosure hinted that civets were not the
source of SARS, as no civets from northern and eastern China were
infected. The Guangdong civets are believed to have been
captive-raised for slaughter, while the civets from northern and
eastern China, where “wild” animals are rarely eaten, were
apparently trapped.
The Chinese ban on eating civets came just under three months
after U.S. Health & Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson announced
a health embargo on the import of either live or dead civets plus
civet parts, such as civet pelts.

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Australia bans animal to human transplants

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, October 2004:

PERTH–The Australian National Health & Medical Research
Council in mid-September 2004 imposed a five-year moratorium on
animal-to-human transplants, called xenographs.
“There were ethical concerns, there were social concerns,
but the major area of concern were the risks,” NHMRC chair Alan
Pettigrew told news media. “There were risks to health, not only of
the individual but to their immediate family, and from there to the
wider population.”
In July 2002 the NHMRC issued draft guidelines that allowed
researchers to exprimentally transplant parts from genetically
modified pigs into humans. These guidelines have now been narrowed.
Pettigrew said that the NHMRC had decided the organs from
nonhuman primates should not be transplanted into humans in any
future clinical trials. Therapies involving use of animal cells but
not entire organs are still under review, he said.

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What happened to the circling vultures?

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2004:

NEW DELHI–“The government is taking its own sweet time in
phasing out a veterinary drug blamed for bringing vultures to the
verge of extinction,” Chandrika Mago of the Times of India news
network charged on September 8, 2004.
Washington State University microbiologist Lindsay Oaks in
January 2003 identified the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac as the
cause of the loss over the past decade of more than 95% of the once
common Oriental white-backed vulture. Also fast declining are
long-billed and slender-billed vultures.
“Vultures have an important ecological role in Asia, where
they have been relied upon for millennia to clean up and remove dead
livestock and even human corpses,” explained Peregrine Fund
biologist Munir Virani when the diclofenac link was disclosed.
“Their loss,” Virani continued, “has important economic,
cultural, and human health consequences,” especially for millions
of Parsees, about 1% of the Indian population, for whom exposing
corpses to consumption by vultures is a religious mandate.
The Bombay Natural History Society warned in February that
continued sale of diclofenac could cause the extinction of Indian
vultures. A similar warning came in June from Samar Singh,
president of the Tourism & Wildlife Society of India. Yet diclofenac
is still in unrestricted over-the-counter veterinary use.

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Panic, not disease, killed Auburn raptors

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2004:

AUBURN, Alabama–A purported deadly outbreak of the avian
bacterial disease mycoplasma galliseptum in mid-2003 caused the
South-eastern Raptor Rehabilitation Center at Auburn University to
kill 17 rare birds after eight others died, halted the tradition of
a golden eagle named Tiger flying at Auburn home football games, and
led to the June 2003 firing of raptor center director Joe
Shelnutt–but there never were any actual cases of mycoplasma
galliseptum, Associated Press writer Kyle Wingfield revealed on
August 24, 2004.
Wingfield obtained a copy of a report on the incident by
University of Minnesota Raptor Center director Patrick Redig. The
report was shared with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Auburn
officials in January 2004 but was not previously made public.
“Instead of a microorganism, the report blames faulty
laboratory techniques and poor decision-making,” Wingfield disclosed.
Tiger is again going to football games, with two understudies.

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